Students For Trump Co-Founder Turns To Life Of Crime And Fake Lawyering

Last week, federal agents arrested 23-year-old John Lambert of Tennessee for pretending to be a high-powered New York City attorney and then bilking his "clients" out of over $16,000. Lambert, calling himself Eric Pope, set up a website for a fake law firm called Pope and Dunn, creating biographies for all of his fake lawyers by copying and pasting from the website for an actual NYC law firm, Cravath, Swaine and Moore.

On Wednesday, The New York Law Journal reported that this John Lambert is the same John Lambert who co-founded the Students for Trump PAC with another student named Ryan Fournier at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, back in 2015. At the time the two founded the group, they were the subject of several insipid profiles about millennials who love Trump. Lambert appeared on NBC and Fox, and even made appearances with the equally skeevy Milo Yiannopoulos.

Lambert appears to have left the group and the college in 2017 in order to embark on his life of crime with an unnamed co-conspirator who has been cooperating with the FBI since April of 2018. In that short amount of time, he scammed several companies and several consumers who were having issues with their credit rating. In one particularly gross instance:

One of the consumers took money from his or her 401(k) account to pay "Pope" more than $10,000, but the phony lawyer eventually stopped responding to emails, the agent said.

Wow, he sure sounds like he might be a sociopath. However, looking over the logistics of his scheme, he is a sociopath who is actually terrible at crime:

As of Wednesday morning, a profile for "Pope and Dunn," Lambert's purported law firm, was still available on the freelancing website Upwork. The profile linked to a defunct website whose archived version from 2017 includes a snazzy logo and claims the firm "protected" more than $380 million for more than 2,000 clients. It also lists five "attorney" profiles that appear to have been partly copied from Cravath's website.

One of the supposed lawyers, Howard Whittington, is described as helping banks "in a wide variety of domestic and international financial transactions, including financing of mergers, acquisitions, recapitalizations and spin‑offs, working capital financings and various special‑purpose financings." That phrase appears word-for-word on the Cravath profile of retired partner James Cooper.

Pope and Dunn's website also called its supposed lawyer Gregory Shapiro "one of the foremost leaders in the field of intellectual property, including intellectual property management and strategy, the development of global intellectual property norms, laws and practices as well as commercialization and enforcement of innovation‑based assets." That is just one word off from the Cravath profile of partner David Kappos.

It sure is hard to be a criminal mastermind when your entire scheme can be undone with one fell Google search. I am not in the business of offering crime tips, but jeez -- if you're gonna try and pull something like this, you should at least have the sense to write the fake biographies for your fake lawyers yourself. That is just obvious.

This may not be the first time Lambert has been involved in shady dealings. In February of 2018, Students For Trump got in trouble with the FEC for refusing to tell them what they were doing and who was funding them. Although Lambert was no longer with the group by then, members told The Daily Beast that those issues were actually all his fault. The group, for the record, has still not filed any income or spending reports. Naturally, they plan to be active in 2020 and currently have an article on their Facebook about how Nixon was the real victim in the Watergate scandal.

It's not clear what kind of sentence he'll receive, but if he's not in there for long, he may still have a bright future as Jacob Wohl's protegé.

Robyn Pennacchia is a brilliant, fabulously talented and visually stunning angel of a human being, who shrugged off what she is pretty sure would have been a Tony Award-winning career in musical theater in order to write about stuff on the internet. Previously, she was a Senior Staff Writer at Death & Taxes, and Assistant Editor at The Frisky (RIP). Currently, she writes for Wonkette, Friendly Atheist, Quartz and other sites. Follow her on Twitter at @RobynElyse

You guys, hi, hello, it is almost the holiday weekend, so we are going to share you a real video posted last night by "Doctor" Sebastian "Don't Call Me A Nazi" Gorka, that hilarious old knucklecuck. We guess now that he had to give up (or gave up voluntarily!) his Fox News contract, he just makes videos for the Twitter. Hoo ... ray?

Anyway, Gorka is super-excited that Donald Trump issued that order last night, giving Bill Barr all kinds of new powers to expose the Deep State for what it is and PROVE once and for all that the gremlins who live inside Trump's diarrhea are correct when they say Hillary ordered the Deep State to do an illegal witch hunt to Trump, yadda yadda yadda, you've seen these people huff paint before, we don't have to type it all.

Here is the video, after which Wonkette will either transcribe it OR we will provide our own dramatic interpretation. Which one will it be? We don't know! Would you be able to tell the difference between the two? We don't know!

We want to say right here at the outset that we hate Julian Assange. Aside from the sexual assault allegations against him, and aside from the fact that he's just a generally stinky and loathsome person who reportedly smeared poop on the walls at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, while reportedly not taking care of his cat, an innocent creature, he acted as Russia's handmaiden during the 2016 election, in order to further Russia's campaign to steal it for Donald Trump. All signs point to his campaign being a success!

So we are justifiably happy when bad things happen to Julian Assange. We are happy his name is shit the world over, and that any reputation WikiLeaks used to have for being on the side of freedom and transparency has been stuffed down the toilet where it belongs. We are happy he looked like such a sad-ass loser when the Ecuadorian embassy finally kicked him out and he was arrested.

And quite frankly, we were OK with the initial charge against him recently unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia. If you'll remember, he was charged with trying to help Chelsea Manning hack a password into the Defense Department, which is not what journalists do. Journalists do not drive the get-away car for sources. Journalists do not hold their sources' hair back while they're stealing classified intel. Assange is essentially accused of doing all that.

Now, put all that aside. Because -- and this is key -- journalists do publish secrets they are provided by sources. That's First Amendment, chapter and verse, American as fucking apple pie and fast-food-induced diabetes. And that is what much of the superseding indictment of Assange unsealed yesterday was about. (And nope, it wasn't about anything regarding Assange's ratfucking the 2016 election or Hillary's emails. Why would the Trump Justice Department prosecute anything about that? It's all about the older Chelsea Manning stuff, the stuff the Obama Justice Department considered charging Assange with, but ultimately declined, because of that little thing called the First Amendment.)